The Man Who Stole Bird Feathers

THE FEATHER THIEFBeauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the CenturyBy Kirk Wallace JohnsonIllustrated. 308 pp. Viking. $27.

In June 2009, Edwin Rist, a 20-year-old American flutist studying at the Royal Academy of Music, smashed a window at the Museum of Natural History in Tring, near London, and pulled off one of the more bizarre robberies of recent decades. Under the nose of a hapless security guard, Rist ransacked storage drawers and absconded with the preserved skins of 299 tropical birds, including specimens collected by the legendary naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century. He intended to fence the birds’ extravagantly colored plumage at high prices to fellow aficionados in hopes of raising enough cash to support both his musical career and his parents’ struggling Labradoodle-breeding business in the Hudson Valley.

Kirk Wallace Johnson’s “The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century” recounts Rist’s odd crime and its even more curious aftermath. Johnson, a former U.S.A.I.D. employee in Falluja, Iraq, and the founder of the List Project (a nonprofit organization that resettles Iraqis marked for death after working with the American military), first heard about Rist’s robbery during a trout-fishing holiday in New Mexico: “I don’t know if it was Edwin’s Victorian sounding name, the sheer weirdness of the story or the fact that I was in desperate need of a new direction in life, but I became obsessed with the crime within moments.” So he set out to learn all he could about Rist, unspooling a complex tale of greed, deception and ornithological sabotage.

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Rist’s feather obsession turns out to have rich antecedents. Johnson describes Wallace’s 1854 expedition through the Malaysian jungle in pursuit of the Bird of Paradise, which “had an otherworldly beauty. … From its tail emerged two wiry feathers that spiraled tightly into two glittering emerald coins.” Walter Rothschild, the eccentric scion of the banking family, eagerly took in the specimens from the expedition and assembled the largest private collection of bird skins in the world at his Tring mansion, which later became a branch of the Natural History Museum.

At around the same time, an insatiable demand for feathers among fashion-conscious Europeans and Americans set off a mass killing of birds for profit. This “slaughter of innocents,” as one activist described it in 1875, led to the banning of the feather trade and the birth of the animal conservation movement. Decades later, the pursuit of rare feathers, by legal or illegal means, was taken up by salmon fly-tying experts, whose creations have become ever more esoteric and elaborate. One master, Paul Schmookle, according to a 1990 profile cited by Johnson, “will use up to 150 different materials, ranging from polar bear and mink fur to the feathers of wild turkeys, golden and Reeves pheasants, the African speckled bustard and the Brazilian blue chatterer.”

Rist became adept at tying flies as a teenager, but as a criminal he proved less successful. He made no effort to cover his internet footprint, and the British police busted him about a year after the robbery. In court, his lawyer argued that he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome and had trouble distinguishing right from wrong, a dubious defense that the judge nevertheless accepted, handing Rist a one-year suspended sentence.

Soon after the trial, Johnson embarked on a quest to track down Rist, identify his network of buyers and recover for the museum thousands of still-missing feathers, vital tools for DNA extraction and other important zoological research. Johnson draws a fascinating portrait of Rist as a self-rationalizing con man and exposes the culture of secrecy and opportunism that marks his fellow fly-tiers. Still, Johnson’s self-aggrandizing pronouncements (“no one else was going to hunt them down but me”) can be grating, as is his tendency to lapse into pumped-up, cliché-ridden prose. “I hopped in my car and bombed up the I-95 to Boston, the revelation setting my imagination on fire,” he writes after uncovering the identity of one of Rist’s possible accomplices, a Norwegian fly-tier known as Goku. In the end, Johnson fails to make much headway in recovering the dispersed treasures. “We’re a tightknit community, fly-tiers,” one man tells him as he is digging into the crime, “and you do not want to piss us off.” Beneath their artistry and collegiality, Johnson suggests, many of these craftsmen seem primarily interested in feathering their own nests.

Joshua Hammer’s most recent book is “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.”